Cuyahoga County Council members as of 2022 include, from left back, councilmen Jack Schron, Michael Gallagher, Martin Sweeney, Pernel Jones, Dale Miller and Scott Tuma. In front, from left, is councilwomen Sunny Simon, Meredith Turner, Yvonne Conwell, Nan Baker, and Cheryl Stephens. (Photo courtesy of Cuyahoga County Council)Cuyahoga County Council

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cuyahoga County officials and council members forged a secret agreement on how to spend $66 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, without a public hearing or vote – and then, quietly went to work lining up projects for their “lists,” according to documents obtained by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

The opaque process left nonprofits and community groups in the dark and enabled councilmembers to control who received applications for the millions in federal funding, split evenly among the county’s 11 districts. Critics, who have dubbed the so-called “community grant funds” as “slush funds,” say the model lacks transparency and gives too much control to individual council members over how money is spent, opening the door to patronage and corruption.

The state’s Sunshine Law prohibits local legislative bodies from adopting agreements or making other decisions outside of public meetings. And according to David Marburger, a Cleveland-based First Amendment attorney and author of Access with Attitude: An Advocate’s Guide to Freedom of Information in Ohio, County Council members’ secretly designed ARPA spending plan and backroom dealings violated both the state’s Sunshine Law and the county’s own charter, which requires council to pass legislation before taking any action.

That means all expenses council approves from their individual ARPA funds are “unlawful” and “invalid” because they stem from an agreement that council never passed with a formal vote, Marburger said.

County officials have defended their process, saying it is above board and that the money is being used for meaningful projects.

“No sunshine laws were violated,” Council President Pernel Jones said in a statement. “The county executive and I agreed to jointly announce our parameters around ARPA funding, which was publicly rolled out in March and April. All proposed ARPA funding has been -- and will continue to be -- heard in public meetings, including opportunity for deliberation and public comment. Each proposal will stand on its own merits and will be given an up-or-down vote after multiple public hearings.”

Jones called controversy over the funding methods “manufactured outrage.” He said the ARPA money is going toward “roads, bridges, public safety, parks and community services,” though there are also funds earmarked for less urgent projects, such as a golf course clubhouse, dog parks and the Cleveland Air Show.

For this story, cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer combed through 45,000 pages worth of documents obtained from a public records request – emails among council members and staff between Feb. 1 and June 22 that included keywords, such as ARPA, rescue plan and discretionary funds. Our goal was to understand how and when council formed its ARPA spending plan in secrecy – without a formal vote and long before the public was even aware of it. Here’s what we found.

The first time the term “community grants” was used in the emails was in a Feb. 8 memo from County Executive Armond Budish to Jones in which the executive proposed setting aside $85 million of the county’s total $240 million ARPA award. The document included a brief description of the program, saying only that County Council and Budish would determine the projects.

After that, council members and staff continued to discuss ARPA privately, emails show.

“There are still discussions taking place between council and the executive regarding ARPA funding,” a county staffer said in a Feb. 9 email to a group that was seeking information on ARPA spending. “There is currently no public hearing scheduled.”

On Feb. 18, the county’s policy advisor postponed a meeting on broadband expansion because “it was agreed that any such meetings would be more appropriate once Council had a firmer idea of how it wished to proceed with the ARPA conversations.”

Although council made no formal announcements about the 11 district-specific community grant funds -- and in fact, indicated in one email that they wouldn’t announce it until April -- word began to spread that county ARPA money could end up in local governments’ coffers.

On March 8, Moreland Hills Mayor Dan Fritz emailed Councilman Jack Schron, saying he was reaching out “after hearing about plans the County has made that will distribute some of their awarded ARPA funds to local municipalities.”

Later that day, during a County Council meeting, the county transferred the bulk of its ARPA money from an ARPA-specific fund into its general fund.

Meanwhile, councilmembers wasted no time earmarking funds for their districts.

On March 9, Councilwoman Cheryl Stephens asked for a road repaving project to be added to “my list for ARPA funds.”

Then, on March 10, the secret agreement was first mentioned explicitly in the emails. Cuyahoga County Councilman Dale Miller, in an email to an official at a community development organization, said “I’m writing to bring to your attention that Cuyahoga County will receive almost $240 million in funding through the Federal Rescue Plan Act. We have reached an informal agreement that $66 million of this money will be allocated for community development projects, to be distributed about $6 million per district.”

It’s unclear when the agreement was made, or who was involved in it. But council members continued setting aside their ARPA funds for preferred projects.

On March 11, Councilman Martin Sweeney asked council staff to “add this to the list,” regarding requests from the Cleveland Christian Home and Cleveland Metroparks.

Several days later, emails show Sweeney setting up a meeting with Cleveland Metroparks, and in early spring, he requested $800,000 for the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, which was given final approval in August.

Miller also had already set up a meeting with Baldwin Wallace University, for whose drone program he later requested community grant funding.

The public finally got its first glimpse of council’s backroom dealing on March 23, when it became clear at a University Heights City Council meeting that County Councilwoman Stephens had pledged $129,000 to a road repaving project in that city, without county council approval.

But council members kept entertaining funding requests. In a March 29 email, a Cleveland Metroparks official said they hoped to gauge Stephens’ “willingness to allocate a portion of her district funding” for a separate project.

On March 30, a week before Cuyahoga County had planned to announce the community grant funding, cleveland.com first published the details of the funding method.

As members of County Council sought recommendations for their proposed projects, each was able to make his or her own rules and control who was even able to apply for the $66 million in ARPA money.

While council members have defended the process publicly, internally some voiced concern.

After Lee Weingart, Republican candidate for county executive, sent a letter to each councilmember suggesting that the funding method appeared to be violating the county charter by allowing individual members to direct spending, one councilman seemed to agree with some of his criticisms.

“The process is too close to what the Charter forbids for my comfort,” Councilman Miller wrote in a response to Weingart.

Miller has approved projects funded through the community grants model, and in a recent interview with cleveland.com, he supported the program, saying that it forces the county to fund more than just downtown projects. But the council emails show Miller was more critical behind the scenes, where he sought, sometimes successfully, to organize the process.

As council deliberated on how to spend its ARPA dollars, Miller was “pushing hard for a formal competitive process” in spending the community grant funds, he said in a Feb. 21 email to Councilman Schron, who later created his own competitive process for reviewing applications.

“I believe that the integrity of the process will be questioned if we do otherwise,” Miller said in the email.

After Miller developed his method for reviewing applications, he emailed his colleagues, encouraging them to adopt a similar approach. In the end, he and Schron were the only council members to announce a competitive process.

Miller was successful, however, in persuading Council President Jones to create a standardized application for all groups seeking ARPA community grant funding, Miller said in a May 9 email to a constituent.

But despite Miller’s efforts, the process for soliciting and reviewing ARPA community grant proposals went forth largely without guardrails.

Council President Pernel Jones did not publicize instructions for how to submit applications for his district’s $6 million in ARPA funding, nor did he post the documents required to be considered for it. Rather, he asked council staff to send them to several groups, such as Slavic Village and two nonprofit community development organizations.

Councilman Martin Sweeney did the same, asking staff to send applications to specific groups, such as the Cleveland Christian Home and the Cleveland Air Show. On June 1, Yvonne Conwell sent a list of 25 organizations to county staff, asking them to email a copy of the ARPA community grants application. Councilwoman Nan Baker and Councilman Scott Tuma sent applications to only the cities in their districts.

The effect of this was confusion among nonprofits, municipalities and community groups seeking ARPA money, emails show.

Representatives from multiple groups, such as the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, St. Martin De Porres High School, Senior Transportation Connection and University Heights all emailed council, befuddled at the application process.

On May 19, a consultant seeking money for the May Dugan Center said they were “scratching our heads” on the council’s process for considering ARPA applications.

In the absence of clear direction from the county on how to seek funds, incorrect information began to spread.

On May 17, the Highland Heights public safety director said he was told each city may be getting $1 million and asked if that was true – it wasn’t.

Despite calling around and seeking a form specifically for District 9 funding, an arts nonprofit struggled to get direction on how to apply for community grant money, they said in a June 15 email.

On May 23, a consultant representing several community groups mistook Miller’s application process – the only community grant announcement that came with a press release -- for the whole council’s process.

It wasn’t just small nonprofits that were left out of the loop. A representative from the Ronald McDonald House told the county in an April 4 email he had heard about council’s grant funding by reading The Plain Dealer.

As a result of the confusion, many groups seeking funds had no practical way to apply for money. The Rape Crisis Center, for example, had been seeking county ARPA funds since at least June 2021, noting the demand for the crisis center’s services saw a “dramatic increase” during the pandemic.

The crisis center remained in contact with county officials and submitted a formal application for Miller’s $6 million in ARPA community grants. On June 14, an official with the crisis center asked for more information on how to apply to other districts’ grant funding, noting that no other deadlines had been announced. County staff responded the next day, saying the crisis center needed to contact individual council members, as each has his or her own process.

But it was already too late. Councilwoman Meredith Turner’s June 15 deadline – announced to only groups of her choosing -- was that same day. Conwell’s July 17 deadline was just two days away, and another councilmember, Scott Tuma, had already decided how he wanted to distribute his district’s money, emails show.

In a June 7 email, a county staffer referred to this process as being “invited” to apply for funding.

At one point, Miller suggested placing the ARPA community grant funding application on the county’s website, but the suggestion went nowhere.

“I don’t think other councilmembers want it open like that,” a county staffer said in response.

Miller told cleveland.com in an interview that the behind-the-scenes agreement was meant to create a “framework” for how ARPA dollars would be spent. Informal agreements governing how council would approve spending are similar to how the county creates its biennial budget, said Miller, who chairs the county’s Finance and Budget Committee.

“The broader agreement is not anything different than what we do every year with the biennial budget process or the budget update in which the county executive some of the key staff and the council president...and sometimes me, get together and discuss the funding and the options and then come up with a tentative framework for the council and so this was very similar to that,” Miller told cleveland.com.

Miller rejected claims that agreeing upon that funding structure outside the public purview violated the state’s Sunshine Law, saying the agreement is part of the “allowable informal communication that’s part of the legislative process,” Miller said.

“I know that there’s some people that try to interpret the Sunshine Law to mean that nobody can discuss anything with anybody except in public, but it doesn’t work that way,” Miller said. “It’s a blended process, where the final decisions and the formal debate and voting take place in public. There are informal discussions between council members that are part of the process. That’s just how it is.”

But David Marburger, the First Amendment attorney, says that’s not how it is. Nothing in the county’s charter or Ohio Sunshine Law allows the “informal agreement” between council members that Miller described without a public vote, Marburger reiterated.

“Dale Miller is a highly experienced legislator – he’s been in either Cleveland City Council or the Ohio legislature or the county council since 1979,” Marburger said. “He knows about how legislative power is supposed to work—all ‘agreements’ and decisions of the legislative branch of government require a formal vote of approval in a regular or special meeting open to the public.”

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